According to Paloma Diaz, senior program coordinator at the Long Institute, the annual conference has had a history of tackling political, economic and social issues relevant to Latinos for the past six years.

Juliet Hooker, associate director of the Long Institute, further defined the conference’s purpose.

“We wanted it to be a conference that reckoned with where we are now, both scholarly and socially,” Hooker said.

Wednesday’s event was introduced with a lecture by photographer Tony Gleaton, who presented his photo exhibition called “Tengo Casi 500 Anos: Africa’s Legacy in Mexico, Central America, and South America,” focusing on people of African descent in the Western hemisphere.

Gleaton related his experiences shooting photos across the Americas, which included hitchhiking through Mexico with a group of horsemen from Los Angeles. After Gleaton’s exhibit, the hosts introduced the keynote speaker, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Coates, a writer and editor for The Atlantic, is a Martin Luther King visiting associate professor at MIT and the author of a memoir titled “The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood.”

Coates’ speech concentrated on the current state of racial equality in the U.S. after the Emancipation Proclamation 150 years ago. He cited historical examples of racism in American policy to illustrate the struggles of black Americans.

“If you look at any social safety model like the New Deal, it was passed in a way that did not empower black people,” Coates said.

Later, Coates critiqued the idea of the U.S. as a post-racial society, claiming that American policy is still intertwined with racism that harms the black population. Coates concluded by saying reluctance to acknowledge racism renders the public unable to tackle larger problems.